The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jane Mayer, Michael J. Mooney, Elisa Gabbert, Nicole Chung, and Ashley Fetters.
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This week, we’re sharing stories from Jane Mayer, Michael J. Mooney, Elisa Gabbert, Nicole Chung, and Ashley Fetters.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Jonny Auping | Longreads | September 2018 | 19 minutes (5,065 words)
Before Richard Spencer became one of white nationalism’s poster boys, before Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos helped normalize stringently racist ideologies, before Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, and before the Charlottesville riots, no one was more suited and prepared to head this generation of prejudice than Derek Black.
Derek’s father, Don, founded Stormfront, the largest online community for racists. His godfather was David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard and probably the most notorious white nationalist alive. By his mid-teens Derek was living up to that pedigree. He hosted a daily radio show in which he advocated for an all-white America and denied the legitimacy of the Holocaust. By 2008, among his community, Derek was a prodigy.
How Derek became a white nationalist is relatively obvious: He was a product of his environment. But in his new book, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, Eli Saslow dives into a much more complex and emotional journey: How Derek dug his way out.
Saslow’s detailed account of Derek’s time at New College in Florida — from his early double life as a student and white nationalist figurehead to his eventual public disavowing of his previous ideology in a letter to the SPLC — required interviews with classmates who publicly shunned him and ones who chose to engage patiently with him (including Jewish and immigrant students who reached out to him), as well as with committed white nationalists, included Derek’s immediate family. In his reporting, Saslow spent “hundreds of hours” with Derek himself, and gained access to personal emails, Facebook, and g-chats containing intense debates, which now serve as the gradual debunking of racist ideologies.
The former Pulitzer Prize winner took the time to speak with Longreads about Derek’s transformation, the rise of white nationalism in the U.S. and whether or not there’s a proper way to engage someone who promotes hateful rhetoric. Read more…

Townes Van Zandt once described singer-songwriter Blaze Foley as “one of the most spiritual cats I’ve ever met: an ace picker; a writer who never shirks the truth; never fails to rhyme; and one of the flashiest wits I’ve ever had to put up with.”
Foley — promising, yet self-destructive — was murdered in 1989 before he turned 40 years old. His songs have been covered by the likes of John Prine and his story is now being told thanks to a biopic directed by Ethan Hawke.
In this poignant piece at Texas Monthly, Sybil Rosen, widely acknowledged as Foley’s muse, writes of her time on set of the movie Blaze and of what it’s like to see parts of your life and the man you loved portrayed by others for the big screen.
Forty-one years ago, I described living in a tree house with Blaze Foley as being like falling out of a dream. This afternoon, landing in the parking lot of the film studio where much of Blaze will be shot, I feel the way I did at 25—as if I’ve been dropped into a mysterious world without quite knowing how I got here.
All at once, Ryan Hawke, a producer on the movie and Ethan’s wife, races out of one of the houses and hugs me. “A person, a real person!” she cries, meaning me. I suppose it must be odd to know someone mostly as a character in a movie script and then have them pop up in the flesh a week before filming begins. It feels a bit odd to me too.
Ryan and I met once before, six months ago in New York City, when she and Ethan and I had dinner together. We were all nervous, but we wanted the same thing: to make a loving movie about Blaze and his music. Collectively, the three of us are like a couple who get pregnant on the first date. You don’t really know each other, but you’re suddenly committed to bringing this baby into the world.
The making of Blaze has constantly demanded that I abandon what I think of as real and enter the envisioned world these artists have created. At the same time, the creators yearn for authenticity, fired by the desire to make their invented world as believable as it can be.
Frankly, it’s a relief to surrender to it. That past no longer exists, except as music and memory. And if I’ve learned anything from Blaze Foley, it’s that memory is like a thought: it weighs nothing. You can’t even hold it in your hand. And these particular memories are forty years old. They’ve been altered in my mind by time and emotion and more time. The only real constant is how I feel about Blaze and the life we lived together.

In Longview, Texas, someone poisoned eighteen of the Birdsong family’s calves, killing them one at a time over the course of four years by feeding them a mysterious grain. But who? And why? Texas Monthly writer-at-large Leif Reigstad digs into a confounding true-crime cold case with no leads, no motive, no patterns, and no suspects.
In more than two thousand investigations over a twenty-year career as a special ranger with the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, Scott Williamson, who now serves as the executive director of law enforcement and theft prevention, has never seen a case like Buck’s. “Typically, anything we saw was either small numbers or ended up tying back to more of a prussic acid poisoning, which is just a natural poisoning of grasses that come under awful [drought or frost] conditions and can kill cattle in a short period of time,” said Williamson. “It’s just an act of God through a natural process. But I have personally never worked a case of intentional poisoning.”
After a fourth calf died, in 2014, Buck took a pair of night vision goggles that Becky had bought him for Christmas and went out into the pasture after dark, hoping to catch the perpetrator in the act. For four nights, he sat on a bucket behind the cover of the trees along his fence line, so that he could see almost the entire pasture, staking out his land through the night with a cooler full of water and Gatorade beside him. He was alone with his thoughts, and all the possible scenarios and unanswered questions began running through his head again and again. But by the time the sun came up, he’d be no closer to catching the killer than he was the first day he heard the terrible wailing of the mother cow.
Everyone had a theory or a quick fix. Put up game cameras, one suggested. (Buck had.) Was it blackleg? one commenter asked. (None of the calves exhibited symptoms of the fatal disease.) Leptospirosis? No. White snakeroot? Bad bull semen? Larkspur? Nightshade? Hemlock? No, no, no, no, and no. Get a Great Pyrenees guard dog. Get a Doberman. Buck has had dogs on his ranch, and they’ve never done much good. I’d sit out there all night with night vision goggles, someone said. Of course, Buck had done that too.
Someone poisoned eighteen of the Birdsong family’s calves in the past four years by feeding them a mysterious grain. But who? And why? Texas Monthly writer-at-large Leif Reigstad digs into a confounding true-crime cold case with no leads, no motive, no patterns, and no suspects.

On August 7, 2016, 10-year-old Caleb Schwab was decapitated on a water slide at Schlitterbahn, a water park in Kansas City, Kansas. Not just any slide: the world’s tallest water slide.
At 168 feet 7 inches tall, Verrückt, which means “insane” in German, was taller than Niagara Falls. Three riders inside a rubber raft would plummet down a nearly vertical seventeen-story drop at speeds reaching up to 68 miles per hour. The moment they reached the bottom, they would shoot up a 55-foot-tall incline—the equivalent of a five-story building—before racing down one last steep slope, finally coming to a stop in a long, water-filled runout.
Shouldn’t someone have been making sure Verrückt was safe? Sure: the park itself. In his Texas Monthly investigation into the incident and the slide’s creator –who’s since been indicted on second-degree murder charges — Skip Hollandsworth learns that water parks are something of a safety no-man’s land.
Although the federal government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission has the authority to set safety standards for such products as baby cribs and bicycles, it has no authority to regulate water parks. That responsibility lies entirely with the states. Some states have agencies that inspect water parks; others rely on the parks’ own insurance companies to do inspections. Texas law, for instance, says that a park must obtain a $1 million liability policy for each of its rides and must have all rides inspected once a year by an inspector hired by the insurance company. But there is nothing in the law that requires the inspector to have any particular certifications. Nor does the law require an inspector to evaluate the safety of such factors as the ride’s speed or the geometric angle of its slide path. According to Texas Department of Insurance spokesman Jerry Hagins, the inspector is charged only with making sure that the ride is in sound condition and meets the “manufacturer’s specifications.” In other words, a water park is allowed to police itself.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Laurie Penny, Mina Kimes, Skip Hollandsworth, and David Marchese.
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Someone wise whose name now escapes me said we can never truly know anyone, and by “truly” they meant “fully.” For Texas Monthly, Skip Hollandsworth tracks the case of one of the boldest, most elusive teams of armored car robbers the FBI has ever tracked. This Houston, Texas, crew wasn’t simply stealing cash from armored cars. They were murdering the cars’ employees, and their system was so effective their hits left few clues for the FBI. When the FBI seemed to crack the case, the ring leader’s criminal life surprised everyone, his girlfriend especially. “He wanted to build his life the right way, have a family,” she said, “and that’s what we were doing. We were building our family and making sure our kids were okay.” But people are complicated, and authorities are still speculating about their culprit’s motives.
Yet even then, no one considered him to be particularly dangerous. Vivian King, a Houston attorney who represented Batiste on some of his cases (she’s now a senior prosecutor in the Harris County district attorney’s office), told me that Batiste was “one of the most well-mannered clients I ever had, perfectly polite, always saying ‘yes ma’am’ and ‘no ma’am’ to me whenever we talked.” And curiously enough, after his 2009 conviction, he seemed to abandon his criminal impulses altogether. He went to work for his neighbor Tommie Albert, who ran a roofing, fencing, landscaping, and container delivery business. “What struck me about Red was that he was interested in so many subjects,” Albert told me. “He would sit at the computer for hour after hour, just doing general research. He’d read about everyone from Muhammad Ali to Dick Gregory. I once told him I had an uncle who was one of the first black pilots in Birmingham, Alabama, and he researched that.”
Albert, whose own son had been shot to death nearly twenty years earlier, hoped that Batiste would someday take over his business. But Batiste said he aspired to get into real estate. Besides renovating homes, he wanted to purchase empty lots on which he planned to open storefront businesses, everything from a beauty salon to a day care center to a snow cone stand. “He even had this idea of buying large shipping containers and converting them into small homes that he would put on his empty lots,” Albert said.
In 2013, on Valentine’s weekend, Batiste met Buchi Okoh at a party. A former college volleyball player, she was in her late twenties, and she too was determined to do something with her life: she had earned her real estate license before becoming a salesperson at Stewart Cadillac, in Midtown. Okoh told me she immediately liked Batiste because he wasn’t a “sweet talker.” He was “straightforward and to the point.”

Jonny Auping | Longreads | April 2018| 12 minutes (3,043 words)
As I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror of a Mexican restaurant, I realized I didn’t want to go back to the table. I didn’t want to follow through with my plans. I splashed a bit of water on my face and tried to give myself a pep talk, but nothing helped. It was all just too painfully awkward.
I was at the restaurant to apologize to Chris, a regular of mine when I used to serve tables a few years back, who I had befriended and stayed in touch with. He didn’t know I was planning to apologize — or even what I’d done in the first place — so if I wanted to go the cowardly route, I could get away with it.
I thought about that when I’d pulled up outside of his apartment and opened the back of my SUV so that his guide dog, Westin, could hop in. I thought about it as I helped lead Chris from the parking lot to our table. I thought about it as I avoided making eye contact with myself in the bathroom mirror. How could I even explain why I was apologizing, anyway?
Let me try right now: We’ve all been in a public place, maybe a grocery store for example, and spotted someone we know before they spotted us. We didn’t feel like talking to them for whatever reason. Maybe we were in a hurry. Maybe we didn’t particularly want to talk to anyone. So we changed directions or walked down another aisle and managed to avoid the interaction altogether. It’s not a particularly nice thing to do — treating someone as if we wished they didn’t occupy the same space as us.
But how do you apologize for that? Worse yet, how do you apologize for walking right past them without saying a word? How do you apologize for using someone’s blindness to avoid interacting with them? How do you begin to fess up for doing that numerous times, months apart?
I reminded myself that this was the right thing to do, that I owed this to my friend, even if he didn’t know it. But I really didn’t want to do it. Soon, the food would be at our table. I could order another beer, tell a couple jokes, listen to his stories and have a great time catching up.
Why ruin that?
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Draylen Mason was more than good at everything he did, he was brilliant. He was a musical prodigy who wanted to be a neurosurgeon, and just days after he died, he was accepted to Oberlin Conservatory of Music. At Texas Monthly, Michael Hall tries to make sense of a senseless death.
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